by Peter Leavell, @PeterLeavell

I danced around the diners at the college cafeteria and spotted my target. She was cute. And I wanted to ask her to the skate party.

Her eyes widened an inch and her foot moved toward me as I approached.

“Hey,” I said.

“Hello,” she answered, her voice sultry.

I’d repeated the words in my head one dozen times, but here’s how they came out. “Are you going to the skating party?”

“No,” she said. She set a hand on the table, opening her posture.

“Oh.” My arms pulled in tight against my body. “Okay.” I turned and walked away, heartbroken.

My wife said that after I’d turned away, she went back to her room and cried. She’d so hoped I’d ask her to skate. She’d never been and thought it might be fun. And the company had been promising.

After a pretty good cry, she took stock of what she wanted and decided she wasn’t going to let this go so easily. A few days later, I answered my phone, and heard a woman with a sultry voice say, “Hello, Peter. I’m going to need to buy a few things for class. A basket, in particular. Would you like to join me?”

Oh yes.

And now we’re married.

My wife broke gender barriers. But I’m going to argue, along with Michael P. Nichols in his book, “The Lost Art of Listening,” that we focus too much on gender differences.

We love categories. We want so desperately to be a specific gender and a specific Myers— Briggs that many experts say we conform to the type we most identify with the moment we took the test.

In the “Happiness Advantage” by Shawn Achor, he makes a compelling argument on how easily a person can change their personality.

What does that mean for our characters? We love to slap labels on them. Oh, it’s so much easier to write a character that conforms to norms. But more importantly, our readers expect the characters to conform to these norms. That might not be good.

We’ve spent the past few decades, arguably centuries, listing off reasons why men and women are different. Polarizing the two sides by delineating roles, loosely based on standards strip mined from the Bible and twisted into perceived desires, we’ve created a cult of domesticity for women and a leadership, head of household with overarching control for men.

Books like Men Are from Mars, Women Are from Venus, where men fit this profile and women that profile, we grow up knowing without doubt that men are this way and women are that way. We train them to fit into the specific categories, and if they break away, there is something wrong.

We write novels within these strict categories for interesting plotlines. When a woman asks the man out on a date, the shock is strong enough to tell us something of the character of the woman. She’s strong minded, strong willed. Like a man. Should that offend us? She’s a human who knows what she wants.

So, if we remove the cult of domesticity, if we say, ‘it’s not the woman’s job to keep the house,’ who is in charge?

Who, then, should do the dishes? We ask each other.

I know men who nurture children and woman who feel no natural motherhood connection. I know men who enjoy obscurity and woman hungry for power. I know men who build massive webs of people and connections, and women who work hard on their ivory tower, uninterested in creating a family so they can work a dozen or more hours a day in hopes to get to the top and enjoy the view.

Why, then, do we create strict lines of masculine and feminine roles? In fiction the roles are perpetuated because it makes tension better, it makes the character development easy. Instead of focusing on a character’s struggle with deeper themes seen in classical works, we go the easy route and she asks him out.

Another example is putting a man in an uncaring category, working hard with no time for a family. And then we catch him reading to a child. Maybe we find it sexy that a man could change so much. The gap is compelling. Easy. But why did he change? There, my friends, is the story. If it’s as simple as she changed him, then we’re tending toward sexism, that her job is to wrangle and control a man. The opposite is true. It’s just as sexist for a man to control a woman.

Jordan Peterson makes a compelling argument that what men and women are looking for in each other is competence. I would encourage you to write characters as competent and incompetent.

—Give the woman an agenda. Don’t make her the plaything of others unless that’s a key point in the plotline.

—Pit your manuscript against the Bechdel test. See if you pass.

—Men nurture. Women nurture. Men are manipulative. Women are manipulative. Stop putting characters in gender categories and just tell your story.

—Focus on the human condition. What does it take to get through the day?

— Michael P. Nichols says, “Perhaps the best response to Freud’s famous question ‘What do women want?’ might have been ‘Why don’t you ask—and then listen?’” Do the same with your characters.

—Michael P. Nichols also points out, “We’re polarizing relations between men and women. Conflict seems to be the price for equality.” Keep that in mind as you write.

Gender relations were difficult when there was only two. As society continues to add genders, the topic is even hotter. Unless gender bias is key to your plotline, move past gender roles to better reflect the human condition.

---

Dino Hunters: Discovery in the Desert

Siblings Josh and Abby Hunter don’t believe their parents’ death was an accident. After taking pictures of the most incredible find of the 1920’s—proof humans and dinosaurs lived together in the same time and place—desperate outlaws armed with tommy guns are on their tail! Only Josh and Abby know where the proof is hidden—in the canyons of Arizona’s desert. When an intruder searches Josh and Abby’s bags inside their new home, the two convince their uncle Dr. David Hunter to return to the canyon and find the pictures they’d hidden. But the outlaws are just as eager to find the proof before Josh and Abby. Can Josh use his super-smart brain to outfox the villains in time? Will Abby’s incredible physical abilities stop full-grown men? And will their uncle believe them?
Dino Hunters is an apologetics-adventure series aimed at the middle reader to help them trust the Bible from the very first verse.